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Archive for the ‘RACIAL CRIMES’ Category

A 14-year-old black boy who was executed for the murder of two white girls in America’s Deep South could be retried posthumously nearly 70 years after his death.

George Stinney was strapped to an electric chair in South Carolina in 1944 and was the youngest person to be put to death in the US over the past century.

He was accused of killing two girls, aged seven and 11, who were looking for wildflowers in the segregated town of Alcolu. The teenager reportedly confessed and was convicted by an all-white jury in a trial lasting less than a day.

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There were no lengthy appeals and he was electrocuted 84 days after the crime took place. According to reports from execution witnesses the straps used to bind him to the electric chair were too big to fit around his frame. He weighed less than 45kg.

The request for a new trial includes sworn statements from two of Stinney’s siblings who say he was with them on the day the girls were killed. Stinney’s now elderly sister, Annie Ruffner, who was seven at the time of the murders, said she and her brother were grazing their cow when the girls appeared and asked them where they could find maypop flowers.

According to Mrs Ruffner, her brother told them he did not know and the girls left. She added: “It was strange to see them in our area, because white people stayed on their side of Alcolu and we knew our place.”

The girls’ bodies were found the next morning in a water-filled ditch. They had both been beaten around the head with what was believed to be a railroad spike.

Stinney’s confession and the transcript from the trial have since disappeared.

It was said by Fox News Channel commentator Geraldo Rivera on Friday that the hoodie an unarmed black teenager wore when he was killed in Florida is as much responsible for his death as the man who shot him.

The veteran TV personality, speaking on Fox & Friends, waded in with an opinion on the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a story that has attracted attention across America over the past month. He later acknowledged that his comments were “politically incorrect”.

Killed … Trayvon Martin.

People wearing hooded sweatshirts are often going to be perceived as a menace, Rivera said.

“I’ll bet you money that if he didn’t have that hoodie on, that nutty neighbourhood watch guy wouldn’t have responded in that violent and aggressive way,” Rivera said.

The unarmed 17-year-old Martin was killed on February 26 in Sanford. He was wearing a hoodie and returning from a trip to a convenience store when neighbourhood watch captain George Zimmerman started following him, telling police dispatchers he looked suspicious. Zimmerman hasn’t been charged and says he shot Martin in self defence.

Supporters of Trayvon Martin rally in Union Square during a Million Hoodie March in Manhattan. Photo: Getty Images

The case brought hundreds of people together in New York with Martin’s parents for a protest march this week. The BET television network said it would air a special, Shoot First: The Tragedy of Trayvon Martin, on Monday.

Of Martin, Rivera said, “God bless him, he was an innocent kid, a wonderful kid.” But he said the case should be a warning to parents to watch what their children should wear.

“If you dress like a hoodlum eventually some schmuck is going to take you at your word,” he wrote in a commentary posted on Friday on the website Fox News Latino.

Geraldo Rivera … “If you dress like a hoodlum eventually some schmuck is going to take you at your word.” Photo: Getty Images

Hundreds of people had posted messages on Rivera’s Facebook page by Friday afternoon, the overwhelming majority of them negative about Rivera’s comments.

Rivera compared his own comments to those of fellow Fox analyst Juan Williams, who was fired by National Public Radio in 2010 for saying on Fox that he gets nervous when he sees people on a plane with clothing that identifies them as Muslim.

“No one black, brown or white can honestly tell me that seeing a kid of colour with a hood pulled over his head doesn’t generate a certain reaction – sometimes scorn, often menace,” Rivera wrote in his commentary.

White supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer has been executed via lethal injection for the infamous dragging death slaying of James Byrd jnr, a black man from East Texas.

Mr Byrd, 49, was chained up to the back of a pick-up truck and pulled whip-like to his death along a bumpy bitumen road in one of the most grisly hate crime murders in recent Texas history.

Brewer, 44, was asked if he had any final words, to which he replied:

“No. I have no final statement.”

A single tear glistened from his right eye.

He was pronounced dead at 6.21pm local time (9.21am AEST), 10 minutes after the lethal drugs began flowing into his arms, both of which were covered with intricate black tattoos.

Brewer’s parents and two of Mr Byrd’s sisters were in attendance.

Appeals to the courts for Brewer were exhausted and no last-day attempts to save his life were filed.

Besides Brewer, John William King, now 36, was also convicted of capital murder and sent to death row for Mr Byrd’s death, which shocked the nation for its brutality.

King’s conviction and death sentence remain under appeal.

A third man, Shawn Berry, 36, received a life prison term.

“One down and one to go,” Billy Rowles, the retired Jasper County sheriff who first investigated the horrific scene, said. “That’s kind of cruel but that’s the reality of it all.”

Mr Byrd’s sister, Clara Taylor, said someone from her brother’s family needed to be present to watch Brewer die so she was among witnesses in the death chamber.

“He had choices,” she said, referring to Brewer. “He made the wrong choices & now has paid the price.”

While the lethal injection would not compare to the horrible death her brother endured, she said: “Knowing you’re going to be executed, that has to be a sobering thought.”

It was about 2.30am on a Sunday, June 7, 1998, when witnesses saw Mr Byrd walking on a road not far from his home in Jasper, a town of more than 7000 about 200 kilometres north-east of Houston.

Many knew he lived off disability cheques, could not afford his own car and walked where he needed to go. Another witness then saw him riding in the back of a dark pick-up. www.youbeautute.com

Six hours later and about 16 kilometres away on Huff Creek Road, the bloody mess found after daybreak was thought at first to be animal road kill.

Mr Rowles, a former Texas state trooper who had only just taken office as sheriff the previous year, believed it was a hit-and-run fatality but evidence did not match up with someone caught beneath a vehicle.

Body parts were scattered and the blood trail began with footprints at what appeared to be the scene of a scuffle.

“I didn’t go down that road too far before I knew this was going to be a bad deal,” he said at Brewer’s trial.

Fingerprints taken from the headless torso identified the victim as Mr Byrd.

Testimony showed the three men and Mr Byrd drove out into the county about 16 kilometres and stopped along an isolated logging road.

A fight broke out and Mr Byrd was tied to the truck bumper with a 7.5-metre logging chain. What was left of his shredded remains was dumped between a black church and cemetery where the pavement ended on the remote road.

Brewer, King and Berry were in custody by the end of the next day.

The crime put Jasper under a national spotlight and lured the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, among others, to try to exploit the notoriety of the case which continues – many say unfairly – to brand Jasper more than a decade later.

King was tried first, in Jasper. Brewer’s trial was moved 240 kilometres away to Bryan. Berry was tried in Jasper.

Hunt for Holocaust loot goes online

Visitors stand underneath pictures of Jews killed in the Holocaust during a visit to the Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem. Photo: AMIR COHEN

THE first internet database of more than half a million pieces of property lost by Holocaust victims has gone online to begin another chapter of restitution.

After years of quiet diplomacy that accomplished little, organisers of the new project, financed by the Israeli government, said the idea was to use new technology in the struggle and to make as much noise as possible.

”This is an activist approach,” said Bobby Brown, executive director of the Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce, known as Project Heart. ”We believe there are no secrets any more about the Holocaust.”

Mr Brown said the idea of property restitution had to be pushed through Twitter and Facebook, although negotiations with countries where property was located ”do not have to be made public right away”.

The project, a non-profit global campaign of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental body, has set up offices in Milwaukee and Brussels.

This is the first worldwide list of property confiscated, looted or forcibly sold during the Holocaust era to be made available to survivors and their heirs. Compiled from hundreds of European archives, including tax records and voter registries, it includes real estate and land, moveable property such as art and jewellery, and intangible personal property such as stocks, bonds and savings accounts.

The project has already invited potential claimants to submit their details to the website, which is in 13 languages. Many of the properties in the database are listed with the names of the original owners, and sometimes their professions – information from the public records to help potential claimants find a match. About 650,000 pieces of property were uploaded this week, and Mr Brown hopes that the list will grow to a million by the end of the year.

Other Jewish organisations have also dealt with restitution. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany has focused on Germany and Austria. The World Jewish Restitution Organisation was established in 1993 to focus on Eastern Europe after the collapse of the communist governments.

There has been progress in the issue of community-owned property but none on personal property, Mr Brown said.

About a third of the 750,000 Israelis who are retirement age are Holocaust survivors and many live in poverty.

Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, said the Holocaust ”was not only genocide but it was also the greatest theft in history”.

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